Home › Forums › Nitro for Mac › Nitro’s thumbails far from futureproof?
- This topic has 7 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 6 days ago by Joachim Jundt.
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October 27, 2024 at 1:26 pm #133983Joachim JundtParticipant
Just came home with 95 new images. These are numbered along the scheme: b0000270.3RF, b0000271.SRF.
As I know the JPG-thumbnails in these RAW files have no high quality, I copied them in to a new folder.
Added this folder to the Nitro side bar.
After a short moment all images showed up.
Marked all of them and clicked on “Miniaturbilder erstellen”.
Next step would be, put them into JPEGmini to reduce the massive size of the previews. This doesn’t alter anything in the file’s name.
In the thumbnail folder only 31 new thumbnails showed up.
Where are the other 64?Weird:
Nitro doesn’t work with folders inside the level ‘/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.nitro/Data/Library/Caches/File System/FullSize-1’
Throwing all thumbnails into one folder is asking for troubles, I’m afraid to witness soon or already witnessing.As you can see, the new thumbnails of today sho some gaps: The images
b0000282.3RF
b0000283.3RF
b0000284.3RF
b0000285.3RF
are existing – but why does Nitro refuse to generate thumbnails?Other thumbails inbetween are older. And since the full file name of the thumbnails has 34 more characters after the “real” file name of the raw file, I tend to believe this is unique enough.
There will never be two thumbnails like
b0000299_3fr_4949EAF747536DAD3AE71283C5F0A01F_r
and
b0299_3fr_4949EAF747536DAD3AE71283C5F0A01F_r inside this folder.If this goes on, I have to ask “what will happen if I reset the image counter of the camera?” I cannot find a system of ignoring and not ignoring an image.
Besides, the context menu with the command “Miniaturbilder erstellen” is far too often absent. For what reason I cannot generate new thumbnails in “Edit mode”? In Capture One “Voschaudateien neu erstellen” is possible in all edit modes if there’s a filmstrip visible.
October 27, 2024 at 8:51 pm #134038Nik BhattKeymasterLet’s start with your title. You are incorrect. Nitro’s thumbnails are future-proofed.
Nitro doesn’t work with folders inside the level ‘/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.nitro/Data/Library/Caches/File System/FullSize-1’ Throwing all thumbnails into one folder is asking for troubles, I’m afraid to witness soon or already witnessing.
You are right. You are asking for trouble. Please do not manipulate the Nitro Previews folder. The organization and format is private to the app. Do not make subfolders. The app will make additional folders (e.g., FullSize-2) when needed to optimize file system performance. The same is true for smaller sizes.
If this goes on, I have to ask “what will happen if I reset the image counter of the camera?” I cannot find a system of ignoring and not ignoring an image.
The characters after the file name encode unique information about the file, and thus resetting the image counter is fine.
are existing – but why does Nitro refuse to generate thumbnails?
I cannot tell based on this description. See if you have thumbnails in the other folders (e.g., Minis). The app avoids creating large previews when they aren’t needed.
Besides, the context menu with the command “Miniaturbilder erstellen” is far too often absent. For what reason I cannot generate new thumbnails in “Edit mode”? In Capture One “Voschaudateien neu erstellen” is possible in all edit modes if there’s a filmstrip visible.
Build Thumbnails >IS< available in Edit mode, but not for the image currently being edited (because thumbnails are built as you edit). If you leave edit mode, but are still viewing the filmstrip (so there is a large image visible), you will see the menu item appear. You can also use it in Edit for images that you are NOT editing by right-clicking on them. I'm sorry that you think the app was so poorly engineered that it cannot handle duplicate file names, or resetting of image counters, or that it would dump millions of files into a single folder. If you have found a bug with thumbnailing, please try to create a series of steps and I will try to fix it. That said, I will not go into deep(er) detail about how the app handles thumbnails.
October 28, 2024 at 2:14 am #134067Joachim JundtParticipantAre you sure you understood what I wrote?
“You are right. You are asking for trouble. Please do not manipulate the Nitro Previews folder.”
For the third and last time: I DO NOT MANIPULATE THE NITRO PREVIEWS FOLDER!!! Neither am I generating subfolders nor deleting or adding files to it. I’m fully aware to not mess up a given Nitro folder structure. And the one asking for trouble imo is Nitro’s programmer by throwing all thumbnails (in their respective size) into single folders one for each thumbnail size, but only because in other apps I experience longer and longer response times the more content one single folder has.
All I do – and this is long term practice, which you are maybe not aware of – is shrinking the big JPGs generated by Nitro using Apple’s raw-conversion machinery with a standalone app to an acceptable size, but without fiddling with their quality or compression settings. My experiments with JPEGmini Pro from Beamr Imaging ltd a couple of years (!) ago did show no quality loss, no hickups and so far it saved me 196 GB of disk space and – more important – my images in the web load faster. JPEGmini Pro appears to have better algorithms.
Once again, I have to do this process because your application sits on a sometime crowded library on the main drive and stores large thumbnails there without giving me the option of using an external SSD for the growing database and number of thumbnails. Using JPEGmini Pro is the only way to postpone the moment of ‘no more storage space available’ a little further into the future.
“The app avoids creating large previews when they aren’t needed.” If I tell the app to create (better) thumbnail views of a selection of images, I expect the app to do so and to do it with all selected images, not only ⅓ of them!
At first, I was pleasantly surprised that Nitro can deal with large Hasselblad files. Downsides are Nitro’s forced residence on the main drive which will not expand. Also, the poor quality of the JPG previews inside the RAW as Hasselblad opts for “fff” (sort of TIF, I guess) previews in their genuine raw converter Phocus. And now this weird behaviour.
Suggestion: I’ll prepare a screenvideo and send a link to it by mail as I’m afraid, me being no native speaker would possibly create more misunderstandable text
October 28, 2024 at 2:54 am #134068Joachim JundtParticipantAs “Editing” my last post is not possible, here’s my addendum:
You could have told me that after 500 thumbnails Nitro creates a new folder. This limit was reached yesterday. So, there’s
‘/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.nitro/Data/Library/Caches/File System/FullSize-1‘
and
‘/Users/username/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.nitro/Data/Library/Caches/File System/FullSize-2‘as well as the other ones. And here the missing 64 images are present. I didn’t notice “Fullsize-2” as I only monitored FullSize-1.
So, Nitro IS using more than one massive preview/thumbnail folder. And Nitro didn’t ignore a single file. Good to know.
These 64 files were recalculated from 1.12 GB to 736 MB, roughly ⅓ less big size. The screenvideo I just made from the process was 266.5 MB and is now 110.7 without any loss of quality.
Oh, and I like to quote you once more: “Let’s start with your title. You are incorrect. Nitro’s thumbnails are future-proofed.” My title had a question mark at the end. Therefore it was no statement, so please use the term incorrect to my incorrect statements. And why did I have to find out myself that Nitro is not filling one big folder, but creating new ones after reaching a 500 images limit? 😉 After all, not knowing this was resulting in this title.
October 28, 2024 at 3:19 am #134069Joachim JundtParticipantThe idea with a screen video did show me another weakness of Nitro.
After the video I deleted 30 test images in Nitro, after that I deleted the folder. Nitro did move the RAWs to the trash and once emptied, they were gone – as to be expected.
However, none of the 30 thumbnails in 5 different folders in Nitro’s data was deleted. Do I really have to clean up manually?
October 28, 2024 at 9:41 am #134071Nik BhattKeymasterI did not provide the 500 images number because it’s an internal detail of the app’s implementation. It’s also something that may change with time.
October 28, 2024 at 9:43 am #134072Nik BhattKeymasterThe reason it does not is because move to trash is undoable, but the action of moving to the trash is done outside of the app’s process. That said, the app could do some extra bookkeeping to handle the previews. I’ll put it on the list.
October 29, 2024 at 11:41 pm #134076Joachim JundtParticipantThank you, a possibility to clean up the thumbnail folders would be nice. Just as information for you: I can also select folders containing JPGs and drag them on JPEGmini Pro. The folder/s remain in their location, it just saves a couple of GB diskspace. And since I’m not uploading RAW images into iCloud, I feel this helps a lot. I’m not used to such big RAW files and maybe I need to alter my workflow anyway.
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